Analyzing the largest Syria crisis Facebook polls, by Camille Otrakji
Originally appeared on Creativesyria’s “The Syria Page” blog
Several Facebook polls on the Syrian crisis have been conducted over the past year, eliciting widespread responses among Syrian and Arab Facebook users. While sample sizes vary, many are much larger than regular online polls thereby ensuring representativeness of the sample, at least among Facebook users. It is worth noting here that Facebook polls prevent account owners from voting multiple times from different computers as they usually can for other online polls. Although some online activists have more than one Facebook accounts, the effect of this bias is negligible given that activists from both sides of the political divide are expected to be equally likely to own a second account.
A significant number of responses by non-Syrian Arabs should be expected given that many of them support the Syrian revolution just as many Syrians supported the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions before them. However, since the contribution of non-Syrian Arabs to the survey remains unknown, it is impossible to tease out Syrian responses from Arab ones. Moreover, it should also be cautioned that Syrians with FB accounts are not a truly representative sample as the sampling frame excludes Syrians without FB accounts as well as Syrians with no internet access. Results, therefore should be read with these limitations in mind.
Having said that, the large sample size of the polls selected here, in addition to the consistent results across a large number of polls make them worth analysing.
Below is a selection of the largest (15,000 to 180,000 voters each, over one million votes in total, all results updated on Jan 23rd 2012) Facebook polls on the Syrian crisis, Voting and community initial biases (where the question first originated) are specified under each question...
http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/?p=13222
http://creativesyria.com/syriapage/?p=129